Board stiff: Okay, so corporal punishment is out for kids–but what about for school-board members? When Denver Public Schools teacher Lynn Pohlod moved to Wyman Elementary this year, she was shocked at what she found. The school, located at 17th Avenue and Williams, has an extremely high student turnover, with…
The DNA tests are back from the lab, and those were not major-leaguers who christened Coors Field Friday afternoon. Before 47,563 polite witnesses, a group of strangers wearing Colorado Rockies pinstripes defeated a band of aliens in New York Yankee road grays 4-1, in the first game at Denver’s graceful…
Neighborhood Botch I was shocked to read Arthur Hodges’s article “Arrested Development,” in the March 29 issue. For what reason was it even published? Mr. Simmons is not under any current investigations, allegations or even suspicions. What is the big deal? From what I can gather from the article, he…
Jack Dempsey lived in Creede, Denver, Steamboat Springs and Montrose, fighting in mining camps across the entire Rocky Mountain region before becoming the heavyweight boxing champion of the world. But he was still known as the “Manassa Mauler.” This summer Dempsey would have been 100 years old. And the tiny…
Congress Park residents were pleased with themselves and the system last fall after winning a legal battle to keep a liquor store from opening in their neighborhood. Their triumph, however, lasted only five months. They are now gearing up for an identical skirmish with the same would-be owner, whose most…
The smell of manure, sweet and earthy, permeates everything in and around the tiny farming enclave of Wiggins. Its musk is carried in the wind as it blows across the brown, dusty fields and then settles in the streets and stores and tiny backyards of the houses in town–an appropriate…
Noblet Danks loved to teach. She loved the children she taught–their energy, their enthusiasm, their eagerness to learn. In the Seventies she taught in Bolivia as a member of the Peace Corps. Back in Colorado she worked in a small Catholic school for two years. In the early Eighties she…
Dem bones: It’s getting pretty lonely over at state Democratic headquarters. The offices at 770 Grant Street used to bustle with an executive director, a bookkeeper, a communications director, a constituent-relations specialist, a political director, an executive assistant and a secretary; now they look like the closing scene in Dr…
Bring your pets inside and hide the children in the cellar. The Thing That Cannot Play is about to be set loose. You know the one. The many-footed monster that has prowled the swamps of Florida and the deserts of Arizona since mid-February. The scourge that put Sparky Anderson to…
A man hired by the City of Denver to help coordinate the Neighborhood Watch anti-crime program has been arrested three times in the past twelve years–at least once for allegedly disturbing the peace of his own neighborhood. Alvertis Simmons, 38, also has been charged by police in Glendale and Denver…
Mammoth Events Center, the well-known auditorium and concert hall on Denver’s East Colfax Avenue, is floundering in a tar pit of debt and may well be sold, according to court records. Mammoth owner Manuel Fernandez and his partners are seven months behind on mortgage payments to the Colorado Housing and…
For four days this summer, Denver will play host to an international trade conference and forum. Hosted by Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor, the forum will focus on ensuring free trade in the Western Hemisphere. Maybe they should start a little closer to home…
In two dingy rooms of the Barrister Building on Grant Street, a handful of well-educated, well-versed and digitally dexterous Denverites owe their jobs to O.J. Simpson. They aren’t lawyers, journalists or even T-shirt hawkers. They’re not making history, they’re recording it. All night, all day. The television-transcription firm Journal Graphics…
After almost three years as publisher of Westword, Jim Rizzi has moved on to become publisher of SF Weekly, a recent acquisition of New Times Inc., Westword’s parent company. Replacing Rizzi as Westword publisher is Amy Cobb. After graduating from the University of Colorado in 1988, she started at the…
No Kidding Around Regarding Karen Bowers’s “A Wealth of Trouble,” in the March 15 issue: 1. Parents have no choice but to believe their children with regard to claims of sexual abuse. Parents would be negligent if they did not believe their children. 2. A child can have childish fantasies…
When his brother’s body got back to Los Angeles last summer, Carlos Yarbrough examined it carefully, counting the bullet holes one by one. There were, he discovered, a total of ten, in the head, back and chest. It had only been a few weeks since Bobby Yarbrough, 21, had left…
cartoon…
Queen for a day: All that congressional talk of welfare cuts so concerned Denver resident Clarissa Pinkola Estes that she contacted Congress herself, offering to testify before the House Ways and Means Committee as a living, breathing example of a welfare recipient. “Either I’m a welfare queen, in which case…
In the original, which goes back to 1941, Robert Montgomery played a prizefighter who’s accidentally spirited off to heaven before his time, then forced to return to Earth in a different, far less efficient body. When they remade the thing in 1978, complete with a new title, Warren Beatty was…
Denver school-board candidate Wazir-Ali Muhammad, who told the Denver Post last week that the school district’s $14 million budget deficit “almost boggles the mind,” apparently knows what he’s talking about when it comes to educational funding shortfalls. Two years ago Muhammad defaulted on more than $20,000 in taxpayer-backed student loans…
The 150 people gathered at a local church last Saturday were irked by the thought of liberal journalists putting their clammy secular fingers on America’s pulse. But judging by the performance of Rocky Mountain News deputy editorial-page editor Dave Shiflett, they would be lucky to encounter a journalist who even…
Ann Jessie felt fine when she reported to her doctor’s office for the results of a routine physical. A few minutes later the 58-year-old Denver woman emerged, shaken by the diagnosis that she had an incurable–and potentially fatal–disease. That was a year ago. Now, Jessie is preparing to launch a…
